Whenever I told friends I was working on a book about food and film, they instantly tossed out the names of movies that occurred to them, usually ones in which a main character is a professional cook, like Stanley Tucci and Scott Campbell's Big Night (1995), Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (Babette's gaestehud 1987), or Claire Denni's Chocolat (1989), or those in which food formulates a dominant symbol system, as in Marco Ferreri's Blow-Out (La Grante Bouffe, 1973).